Footsteps with Character: the Art and Craft of Foley
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Footsteps with character: the art and craft of Foley BENJAMIN WRIGHT One of the attendant features of contemporary Hollywood sound style is the heightened treatment of the smallest of sonic details, as if sound practitioners intend audiences to hear the unhearable. These aural closeups are not so much exaggerated from their real-world context as audibly distinguished to convey narrative details that otherwise would be lost in the din of a film’s busy soundscape. One such example can be found in the cafeteria jam sequence in Fame (Kevin Tancharoen, 2009), when a group of students spontaneously breaks into a roughly choreographed song-and- dance number. Amidst a busy background track of crowd noise and an array of foregrounded diegetic instruments including electric guitar, electric bass, drums, violin and piano, we can also distinguish the intricate movement of a tap dancer’s shoes, the air whooshes that accompany his dizzying turns, and the brush and whisper of his clothes. In large measure, the level of detail and definition present in this example is symptomatic of the complexity and ambition of modern sound style and practice. Turning the smallest of sounds into large sonic gestures has been the domain of Foley since the conversion to the sound period. Developments in 24-track recording technology and the proliferation of digital audio workstations have transformed the aesthetic textures of Foley sound effects and the occupational identities of Foley performers in ways that have reconfigured task structures and stylistic conventions. In contemporary practice, direct-to-picture professionals, as they were once known, have achieved a level of creative autonomy such that many now call themselves Foley artists. Screen 55:2 Summer 2014 204 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved doi:10.1093/screen/hju010 At one level, the shift in designation from Foley ‘walker’ to ‘artist’ is representative of the broader institutional changes that accompanied the transition of sound effects editors from mechanical labourers to creative decision-makersthroughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. Indeed, it was not uncommon in the studio era to mistake a Foley practitioner for a sound editor, since the work of syncing sound effects to picture was similar and, perhaps more significantly, many sound editors performed and cut their own Foley effects. In the past decade, however, the degree to which performance and digital technology can be tied to the task structure of the Foley artist, together with a series of developments surrounding the representation of Foley professionals by Hollywood craft unions and guilds, have signified a crucial shift in direct-to-picture sound recording and performance. According to Foley artist John Roesch, ‘Now with digital advances, as far as sound quality goes, the playing field has been leveled somewhat. Really, the big determining factor is not technical anymore, it’s 1 1 Personal interview with John strictly artistic.’ Roesch, 23 June 2009. In this essay I look more closely at modern Foley performance and aesthetics, giving special attention to the customized nature of Foley effects and the importance of creating sound with ‘character’. What interests me is not only how Foley professionals have negotiated their role as sound artists but how the professional goals of Foley have shifted in response to the increasing use of digital audio workstations. I consider the rise of Foley artistry to be a consequence of the freelance nature of modern Hollywood film production. In the past twenty-five years, Foley has become the site of significant technological and stylistic activity at the levels of recording, mixing and performance. Whereas the artistic value of Foley has been historically defined by a rigid set of conventions, modern Foley practice and the professionals who design and perform direct-to-picture effects carry out duties that now increasingly emphasize the dramatic texture of an otherwise ordinarysound. In addition to providing synchronized effectsthat serve the picture, modern Foley practice might therefore be considered as a performance art. In turn, the social and functional tasks of the Foley artist have expanded in ways that reflect their status as sound effects creators and performance artists. Unfortunately, despite some utopian attitudes expressed in trade publications about the new-found independence of Foley professionals, this development has not drastically redefined the work of Hollywood sound professionals, nor has it slowed the industry’s budgetary cutbacks in postproduction and the frequency of shorter schedules in the audio postproduction field. As a commercial standard of sound reproduction in radio, television, film and videogames, Foley sound serves two broad functions: first, to replace and reinforce particular elements from the production track and match the sync to the original recording; second, to ‘sweeten’–that is, to enhance – material that is otherwise not in the jurisdiction of sound effects editorial. To this end, Foley sound serves the dramatic functions of the narrative by characterizing and dramatizing the smallest of diegetic sounds. Although the social and aesthetic tasks are similar to those in sound editorial (effects, 205 Screen 55:2 Summer 2014 . Benjamin Wright . Footsteps with character: the art and craft of Foley dialogue and Automated Dialogue Replacement [ADR]), Foley has experienced a significant shift in terms of its ideological operations that has become less about matching sync and more about capturing the dramatic 2 2 Dramatic ‘feel’ can be considered ‘feel’ of sound effects. one of the many metaphorical Film historian Stephen Bottomore has shown that from the early years of phrases adopted by sound practitioners to describe their work the twentieth century, films in the USA and Europewere often accompanied creating sounds in the film and by sound effects, produced by skilled operators using a wide array of ‘traps’ recording industries. Metaphors or sound effects machines. By the mid 1910s, Bottomore suggests that such as ‘warm’, ‘bright’ and ‘full’ connote the abstract technical audiences had become accustomed to the attendant soundsthat filled out the demands of sound production. See audiovisual experience, and were critical of theatres that employed Thomas Porcello, ‘Speaking of unskilled performers or utilized ‘inaccurate’ sounds for particular imagery.3 sound: language and the professionalization of sound- In many ways, the logic of practice that had shaped early sound recording engineers’, Social accompaniment was inherited by the organization of synchronized Foley Studies of Science, vol. 34, no. 5 effects in the years that followed. By 1929 Hollywood sound engineers had (2004), p. 735. 3 Stephen Bottomore, ‘The story of still not completely solved the representational dilemmas of synchronized Percy Peashaker: debates about sound film. In the first few years of synchronized sound filmmaking, sound effects in the early cinema’, Hollywood films rarely employed complex marriages of dialogue, music in Richard Abel and Rick Altman (eds), The Sounds of Early Cinema and effects, preferring instead to concentrate on dialogue, nondiegetic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana music and the occasional narratively pertinent sound effect. Equally, the University Press, 2001), p. 132. manner in which specific sound effects were recorded, and the logic concerning an effect’s placement in the final mix, had not yet been secured through convention. One of the more challenging aspects of sound production in the conversion era was achieving accurate synchronization with particular effects, such as footsteps and handclaps. Since most actors had different walking cadences, it proved to be difficult for engineers to match a 78-rpm recording of footsteps properly with the picture. In 1928, as Universal Pictures was preparing a large-scale silent adaptation of Show Boat (Harry Pollard, 1929), the mass shift to synchronized sound was already underway at other studios. Midway through production, Universal decided to release the film as a ‘talkie’ in an attempt to capitalize on the trending popularity of synchronized sound. Universal rented the Fox-Case sound-on-film system and reshot some sequences, including a lengthy prologue, and postsynchronized the rest of the film with added dialogue, music and effects. When the studio’s sound engineers had difficulty synching a variety of complicated visual gestures, a journeyman employee in the studio’s prop department named Jack Foley had the idea of synchronizing ‘live’ sound effects to the projected picture. Foley and a small crew of engineers and props people performed a variety of sound effects, including handclaps, footsteps and background chatter, while viewing the projected film during the orchestra’s recording session. After Show Boat, Foley continued to perform sound effects for the early talkies, focusing on props, footsteps and the occasional cloth effect to emphasize a character’s costume. As Vanessa Theme Ament suggests, 4 Vanessa Theme Ament, The Foley direct-to-picture sound recording was invented out of necessity, and did not Grail: the Art of Performing Sound fit into an established occupational role or follow a set of established for Film, Games, and Animation 4 (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2009), conventions. However, the functional specificity of Foley’s performance p. 7. techniques was not dissimilar from sound effects accompaniments in the 206 Screen 55:2 Summer 2014